GitOps & DevOps: differences, parallels, and why both is better

Digital transformation has led more and more organisations to adopt a DevOps culture. This portmanteau (‘Dev’ for development and ‘Ops’ for operations) refers to the bringing together of traditionally siloed teams to produce new applications and services, and make updates, at high velocity. DevOps extends agility to the whole software development lifecycle (SDLC). By speeding things up, organisations can be more competitive and deliver more value to their customers.

The DevOps core foundation is collaboration, where dev and ops teams work together to create pipelines that can be spun up automatically, rather than depending on service request culture to achieve frequent deployments. While these practices are consistent, the tools you use as part of your DevOps approach can vary. By doing DevOps, organisations can deploy more often, develop new features, release updates more quickly, and fix any issues in an instant.

In short, like agile, DevOps is a cultural transformation. By eliminating silos, engineers are free to work across the entire SDLC, including development, testing, implementation, and operations. As a DevOps culture matures, it might evolve to incorporate new elements to speed up other processes, such as quality assurance (sometimes called DevTestOps) and security, known as DevSecOps, which you can find out more about here – and operations–related tasks. The latter is how GitOps was born.

Unlike DevOps, which is a tool–agnostic cultural approach, GitOps is an operational framework applied to infrastructure automation. As the name suggests, it’s tied to a specific tool – Git. It’s optional – if you have a DevOps culture, you don’t have to do GitOps. But you can’t put the cart before the horse. If you want to practice GitOps, you’re going to need a mature DevOps approach in place.

As you can imagine then, GitOps incorporates software development lifecycle best practices, such as collaboration, version control, continuous delivery/deployment (CD), and compliance, and applies them to infrastructure automation. With Git as a single source of truth, GitOps provides an operational model for infrastructure provisioning, enabling developers to manage and trigger deployments using pull requests.

With Git containing your system’s entire state, any changes are visible and auditable. And because it’s been built around the developer experience, teams can use GitOps to easily manage infrastructure with no steep learning curve in sight. They can simply use the same software development tools and processes they’re already familiar with.

Other than a Git repository to track any changes you make to a project, you don’t need a specific product or platform to do GitOps. While it’s an effective way to manage Kubernetes, and is often touted as such, its principles are relevant to all types of infrastructure automation, including virtual machines (VMs) and containers.

Now you’re better acquainted with both, let’s take a look at GitOps and DevOps side by side.

If you’re ready to step up your DevOps culture, GitOps might be the way to go. Our latest eBook is packed with the principles, practices, and benefits of GitOps, so you can figure out if it's a good fit for your organisation.